musings of the clueless

lots of times if I tell my boyfriend that I am proud of him for dealing with a situation, or that I'm sorry he's having to deal with a situation, he will say "no it's my own fault." meaning that he feels like he doesn't deserve praise or comfort for dealing with a situation that is his fault. (for example a financial problem caused or exacerbated by him having been too anxious or absentminded to deal with the situation sooner.) and I tell him this and I will tell y'all this, that I don't believe that. I think you are even braver and stronger for taking steps to deal with a mess that is of or partly of your own creation, because you have to cope with guilt and shame on top of the thing itself, and because you're fighting against the same ingrained dysfunction in yourself that caused the mess. that's like the bravest and most constructive thing you can do and you should be proud and I am proud of you.

also, mistakes don't mean you deserve to suffer

whats it like to lock your fingers with someone you love

Seeing a steady rise of people using the library as we carry through summer break, so here's a quick thread from a staff member on little things you can do (for free!) to make life easier on staff. Let's go!

The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again

Me irl: the problem isnt taxes, youre thinking too small. The problem is that the federal government isnt taxing the right people the right amount. Theyre taking all our extra cash in our measly little wealth bracket and letting the billionaires hang on to more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime. The only way anybody gets a single billion is either through exploitation or inheriting it from someone else who did the exploitation, nobody who has that kind of money earned it legitimately. Not only do we need to strip that back into social safety nets for those of us theyre bleeding dry instead, but they need to establish hard laws and regulations to prevent that kind of exploitation from happening in the first place!

My coworkers: man, youre a real red-card commie, aren't you? You gonna start telling us to vote NDP and that healtcare isnt a scam too? Jesus christ go give someone else your goddamn revolution pamphlets, lenin.

Me on tumblr: while i appreciate the animosity towards billionaires, i dont think literally dragging a guillotine into the streets and beheading people as a public spectacle is going to actually solve the problems inherent in the system considering the french already tried that and it didnt work out well for them. Also i dont think anybody has the right to decide who lives and who dies, im pretty anti death penalt-

Tumblr users: how does that boot taste, fascist?

Unmute !

It is a tragedy that this is not credited.

I saw these guys live and it was a phenomenal experience, The cellist is called Abel Selaocoe and the band is Chesaba, which includes a percussionist and bassist.

They are all incredibly talented and charasmatic on stage. If they are ever in your part of the world, go see them!

Here is the full performance of this piece

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

Here's a gentle core exercise you can try!

Sometimes used to regain ab strength after pregnancy (but consult with your doctor first of course).

Can you let me know in the comments if this hurts your back to do? How about with the assisted version? Feedback lets me better serve you!

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

Little pianist 🎵

Amazing photograph taken in the fraction of a second where the target doesn’t even know he’s being tackled yet. Idiot.

many years ago me and best friend were traipsing around the local history museum . the museum had a long overlooked mummy room on the third floor

the sarcophagus on display was open, the elaborate lid hanging a foot above the casket to barely reveal the mummy inside, like;

and bestfriend said, Sometimes they wrote messages under the lid for the Dead to read ,

and she laid down on the dirty museum carpet next to the glass case , patting the ground next to her for me to follow suit . sure enough, the underside of the casket lid was covered in inked characters , a brochure of directions to the afterlife in case they woke up all organless and confused

someone else wandered in to the little mummy room and asked if we were ok. she said, Come check this out. so he laid down on the other side.

i crossed my arms over my chest , and so did they . four bodies , seeing a message intended for one; we love you, we miss you, we hope you find your way

There was a mummy exhibition that came through the Museum of Civilization in my hometown years ago. I went and spent most of the day there. The thing I was most struck by was that these were just people. The jewelry they prized looked exactly like stuff that was being sold a few blocks over in local merchant stores. The grave portraits looked like relatives of the people wandering around in the exhibit. Across thousands of years we still liked the same stuff and looked the same and were scared of the same things (death, the unknown). The human experience really is universal and there is something so touching and beautiful about that.

Great they translated the Che Guevara/Marie Antoniette romcom manga. Time to see how it is.

The Romcom manga where Marie Antoniette, queen of France, and Dr. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna are reincarnated as young adults and live together as roommates

try to keep up geez

It's exactly what you'd expect.

So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.

Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal

No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".

To me, as a non-native English speaker, The Hunger Games is also a good example of this.

A big part of Katniss' character is how much of her life is focused around hunger itself. She has to hunt and gather illegally, just to survive and keep her family and community fed. She's never grown up with all the good things, we take for granted. That's part of why the title The Hunger Games is so cool in and of itself.

In Danish, on the other hand, the direct translation would be "Sult Spillene" - which is a bit of a mouthful to say, for one, but also just doesn't convey the same urgency or severity as the original.

Instead, Danish translators had to look at the bigger picture. And what are the Hunger Games? They're a game of death - and death is of a similar degree of coolness as hunger, as well as being an equally big part of Katniss' existence. So what did they rename it to? "Dødsspillet" - or in English: The Death Game. In English it's a little too on the nose, maybe, but to a Dane that hits home as cool.

On the other hand, things such as nicknames are also difficult to translate, especially if they're a play on words. Katniss' nickname is "Catnip" - and to make that particular joke/nickname work, the first translations had her name changed to Kattua. Sometimes, a translation might not even include the jokes or wordplay at all, if no suitable equivalent is available, meaning a lot of humor is lost. But that's better expanded on in a different post.

A great example of this can be seen in Shrek. In the English version In the movie there is a scene where Lord Farquaad is asking Gingerbread if he knows the Muffin Man and I say in the English version because in other translations (at least 3 that I know of) they used a character from a well-known nursery rhyme in said language, for example in Latin Spanish PinPon was used and I think that in the Spanish of Spain Mambru was used, both of which star in very typical and famous children's songs.

When the translators were transferring everything to the other language they had to invent these lines, but without them the scene itself would not make sense, because as a non-native English speaker if they had left The Muffin Man for me it would not have made any sense .